


Living for Someone Else

by Lyssandra_Med



Series: One-Shot [45]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood Magic, Dark Hermione Granger, F/F, Love Transcending Death, Raising children, Ritual Magic, Soul Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-23
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:47:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23285728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyssandra_Med/pseuds/Lyssandra_Med
Summary: Bellatrix has one goal. Ensure Delphi lives, free and unburdened.Hermione has the answer.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Bellatrix Black Lestrange
Series: One-Shot [45]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1429282
Comments: 2
Kudos: 83





	Living for Someone Else

**Author's Note:**

  * For [drD](https://archiveofourown.org/users/drD/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Huge Small Problem](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16145072) by [drD](https://archiveofourown.org/users/drD/pseuds/drD). 



> Un-edited. Had a weird thought when rereading Doc's lovely work. This spun out of it.

It was nothing.

Yet she was everything.

All of them broken down, none of them remaining whole. So much had been shattered yet all the little pieces were still so much larger than the whole.

Fractured.

Little dolls of porcelain that had been carved down into daggers, into leering smiles, into the grinning face of  _ someone _ that she could only just barely remember.

_ Andi- _

_ Cissa- _

_ Mother- _

_ Father- _

_ Siri- _

_ Regi- _

_ Aunts and Uncles and Great Aunts and Great Uncles and Grandfathers and Grandmothers- _

Their names and titles were bestowed in odd intervals, odd births and odd dates. Magic made the determination, magic made the might,  _ magic made them and owned them and drove them and  _ **_her._ **

The magic was fleeing from them all. It was running away, falling in rivulets that stung their skin, sprinting further than any of them could ever catch.

Infertility. Squibs, even. Abominations that would have been far better off smothered in the womb or hung out to dry.

Demons, if some of her older relatives were correct.

Maybe the  _ thing _ pulsing inside of her would turn out to be one of those creatures. Something more fitted towards fire and blood, something twisted until it spoke with a serpent’s tongue.

_ He did this to her. He stole this from her! _

The bastard lied and schemed and twisted  _ all _ of her affections until only  _ imperfection _ remained. Until she was nearly half a century old and blind to all of his selfish ambition. 

_ Blind to truth! _

How much had she given up for his ideals? How much had she sacrificed for  _ him? _ How long had she lain in that fucking prison, alone and broken just for  _ him?  _ To have herself a bed in a house in a city in a country on the farthest fucking side of the earth?

Too much.

_ “Fuck!” _

The word was a scream that bashed itself to bits against the walls, an emotion cracking open and splitting all her fingers. It was blood sucked off a cut digit, a tongue laving at a wound.

Families were all shit. Hers were all shit. All the others were shit as well.

_ Delphini. _ The littlest star growing inside of her, the creature that had eaten its way to her heart.

_ She would have no family. _

Not if the British Ministry had it their way. Not if all those other Ministries that sought to give them aid had any say in it. Not if  _ polite _ society had a voice in the matter. 

She knew that she would die. She had made peace with that fact long ago, just as she had made pieces of iron into itty bitty spikes. Had sworn that she would die while powdering gypsum and charcoal and pyrite and laying all of it into a ritual circle.

They  _ would _ end up catching her. It would be tomorrow if not today but they  _ would. _ The Earth, the World, that foreign Goddess that trembled within them all were speaking in the same tongue. Her doom was nigh. It was an inevitable truth. The child inside of her would suck away what blood remained, leave her dry and empty and nothing but a bad memory for other mothers to scare their children.

But Delphi would be strong. It was the one gift that she could give her unborn daughter, the one boon that could come from her blood and from her magic. But she would lose it all. Lose her abilities, loser her power, lose all her might and magic.

This was a dark thing, a crushing thing that wormed and wriggled against her mind the closer it grew to completion. It mated with her darker thoughts, combed through every painful memory and twisted reality all about. The knife within her grasp could hardly keep from shivering in delight. Her plan was the last act of a fearful mother who wanted nothing more than  _ everything _ for her child.

“Oh Muddy, I’m too good to you,” she crooned and cackled in a broken voice, chipped words falling harshly against the captive bound and gagged in the corner of the room. The body itself wasn’t moving, it was pinned in place with magic and flooded with everything she knew.

The Mudblood knew her plans. The Mudblood had grown cold, clammed up, realized what was happening and found nothing else to do except remain patient and quiet.

The Mudblood would live.

Bellatrix would die, if only so a piece of herself could make it past the next few years.

And now the ritual had begun and with it all hopes of halting the madness.

With no more pretence at sentimentality, Bellatrix began. There was nothing further with which to torment her chosen vessel, and she knew this magic inside and out. Her first cut was deep enough to hurt and deep enough that left alone, she would die. The slicing of her flesh signalled that yes, it would all be over soon. 

Magic sang to her in sweet tones. It caressed her form, her mind and body, letting her know that even now she was not alone. Never alone. It was the guiding hand atop her own, swirling patterns digging into skin and peeling back flesh. It was the red, it was her vessel, it was her heart and then her soul.

It wasn’t a Horcrux. Never a Horcrux. She had seen the madness that act could create and while she desired to live and see and feel her daughter, she would not do that to the child. She had no wish to live a half-life or to be broken down further than she already was.

She would leave that horror to the older monsters, and let her make new ones in their stead.

The vessel began to squirm and wriggle and fight against the bonds that held her once the transference began. The next portion was the worst and while she begrudgingly admitted that the fight was inspirational she knew that there was no stopping this. Nothing could ever end this lineage of madness, not even the Aurors that she could hear knocking against the roof, the doors, slinging spell after spell in a valiant effort to retrieve their Golden Girl.

They would not breach her defences, not while she still had life to give.

A binding act, a soul married to a soul, a child yet to be born and a girl already grown.

Delphi would live through this, would find herself protected from all the fury, would find a family that could keep her safe and soon enough her wings would unfurl. 

Odd word, that.

Unfurl. Hurl. Throw out the baby with the bathwater. Or the blood, such as it were.

No need for soap, no need for cleanliness. The fresh blood was a marker of her arrival and Bellatrix took that opportunity for what it was. How could she not? The shudder that ran through the air when her child first  _ screamed, _ first fought with life. It was beautiful.

Magic calling magic, calling her home. Magic gave her one last moment with the star. Magic let her have one last touch, let her savour the contact, let her watch with trepidation as the fading purple thread that connected them heart to heart became frayed and loose, lodging and piercing into another.

The Mudblood screamed, the Mudblood writhed, and when her voice grew hoarse a Mudblood she was no more.

Whoever could have imagined the winding twists of fate that led her here. No one in her old life would have dreamed of her falling so low. The Ministry couldn’t have foreseen it. Nor her old Master. No one, not even her sisters.

But Delphi would be safe. She would be complete, left alone and led onwards towards greatness.

It was a good enough job, if she could say so herself.

\---

The first year brought with it the worst pain. The ring now magically glued onto her hand trumped the one glued onto Harry’s. He never begrudged her the bump in position, not out loud at least. 

But he was displeased, and she could see that. He had his tells. A gruffness would invade his tone. His eyes would sharpen, thin lines of piercing green. It was that little bit of magic and personality that Sirius had managed to pass onto him by virtue of being his Godfather, by virtue of their shared blood.

It was a virtue that she hadn’t earned. Black hair, sharp curls, a silver gaze that was not her own.

But there was nothing that she could do about it. Nothing would change her status, nothing would change her blood, nothing would kill the ache inside her heart or right this horrid wrong.

And truth be told, she liked it.

She  _ liked _ the way that her peers and elders would give wide berth whenever she strode by. She  _ liked _ that there was fear in their eyes whenever they saw her or little Delphi in her arms.

She  _ liked _ knowing that they had feared the Black Witch, and by extension now feared her.

\---

Three years wasn’t exactly a monumental effort. Mostly she took it all day by day. The portrait that she had swiped from Narcissa helped with that. The hope inside her heart that Delphi would understand what had happened one day, would  _ forgive her, _ helped with that.

For now, she would take it as it came.

Delphi could throw a tantrum, could change her hair and look frightful or scared, could scream like a banshee and make everything so much  _ worse. _

Delphi could summon Fiendfyre at two, and then every expectation had gone to pot.

But Delphi was  _ hers _ just as much as she had been Bellatrix’s. Only a child, only a little girl with anger that was not intentional, fear that wasn’t meant to be painful.

Delphi wasn’t  _ evil. _

But that portrait had plans and intentions and  _ desires. _ She would let it go a bit but by all the Gods she would stop the end before it began. The threat of fire was enough to get it to tone down the rhetoric, and it seemed that having been made in Bellatrix’s youth afforded it some sick sense of self-preservation.

It toned it down as well, and the company wasn’t exactly unwanted. This version of the witch was tempered in the fire of her family but not yet broken. She was molten with her anger but not vitriolic towards things she did not understand or know.

This one was curious, or as curious as a woman stuck inside a portrait could be.

This was the one Hermione came to love, in her own twisted little way.

\---

Five years brought with it the first real change.

Domesticity was never something that she had wanted in her youth. She had wanted the world, had wanted the Ministry, had wanted each and every one of her peers to look at her with awe and perhaps just the little mote of fright.

Even in the midst of finding herself saddled with Delphi she had remained as driven towards her goals as she could manage. She published entries in magi-scientific journals, spent hours labouring on novel experiments, even found herself the time to pick up a degree from a Muggle University and secondary education as an intern to a researcher who specialized in blood-bonds and rituals.

She made due for years. Her life was rigid, for years. Her life was peculiar and set in stone, walled inside of a reborn Grimmauld and learning all the little ways that  _ she _ had changed.

Continued to change.

Some would call it hiding. She preferred to label it as  _ ‘Preparing.’ _

She ran. No preamble, no preemptive schmoozing with the gentry. Made sure that Rita was hamstrung, bound to her reborn House, made the little bug pledge on her life that she would print what Hermione approved and no more. She rose herself from self-imposed obscurity, reached back to cradle her title of Brightest of the Age, espoused love when others called her the mother to a Hellspawn.

And Delphi  _ was _ a lovely child, circumstances of her parentage notwithstanding.

She won.

\---

Raising a teenager was much harder than she would have ever thought possible. Nothing really prepared her for it, even all the advice from her mother and father. The fact that she was raising one who was nearly half her own age made it even harder, in her opinion.

Raising one who seemed fit on becoming the spitting image of her birth mother was just icing on the cake.

Not that Delphi often looked like Bellatrix. Her tones were more muted, and a comfortable cerulean was more her style. Short hair, tattoos, piercings galore. A persistent rebel to the core.

But when she was angry? Cross? Desiring for something more than simple revenge?

Black curls. Silver eyes. A set to her jaw and cheekbones that made Hermione speechless. The portrait was somehow speechless as well, and Hermione took that to mean whatever it could.

But she loved her daughter no matter the look, and the years that passed by proved that.

Her looks couldn’t worry her. Or rather, it couldn’t  _ mostly _ bother her.

She realized not long after Delphi’s eighteenth birthday that it wasn’t her daughter looking like Bellatrix that worried her. It wasn’t that glare that gave her the sharpest bit of pride, it wasn’t the twist to her lips that set her heart on edge.

It was that Delphi looked like her.

And it was that she _liked_ it.


End file.
